Orchestra scores with formidable works by Khachaturian, Rachmaninoff

The program could easily be titled Tortured Beginnings. Khachaturian's Piano Concerto went so badly that the composer was found after the premiere hugging a birch tree while weeping. Rachmaninoff fled from the badly played premiere of his Symphony No. 1 with plugged ears.

When both works arrived Wednesday in the Philadelphia Orchestra's Kimmel Center concert, you could understand how awful things happen to such good pieces. Rachmaninoff didn't yet know how best to sequence his musical ideas. Khachaturian's first movement impulsively changes gears, in what seems like a thematically related string of encores. Yet Wednesday's concert was perfectly successful: Music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin dodged land mines in Rachmaninoff. Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet intelligently gave the Khachaturian the opposite of what that piece is used to.

Absent from the orchestra concerts since the 1940s, the concerto was once championed by ultra- brilliant William Kapell. Live recordings from that period show that both he and Eugene Ormandy went for effects over details. Thibaudet built effects from details, perhaps without the killer instinct one is used to here, but the piece itself has fierce density no matter who plays it.

Curiously, the performance embraced the music's episodic character. Turning points were approached with deliberation, rather than a headlong dash as Kapell and Ormandy once did. Nézet-Séguin contributed operatic phrasing during lyrical sections of the first movement and throughout the slow movement. If you judge concertos by their slow movements (as many do), then this one is a winner.

That movement calls for a flexatone, a percussion instrument used as a sound effect in films. The orchestra's version of it, unlike any I've heard, had a less eccentric wailing effect similar to the Chinese erhu. Elsewhere, the concerto is so monstrously imposing that the orchestra didn't quite have its hands around it. Thibaudet's thoughtfully chosen encore was a songful Schubert waltz, said to have been written down on a tablecloth, passed down among pianists, and arranged by Richard Strauss.

The Rachmaninoff symphony is still discussed with condescension, perhaps because it begins with a long and indecisive soliloquy. But this is no practice symphony. Developing grand structures rigorously from small, asymmetrical motifs, it's a template for the composer's later symphonies and came to Shostakovich's aid in his Symphony No. 5.

I would have loved more emphasis on the exotic inflections that give a tangy accent to the symphony's cosmopolitan suaveness. But unlike many Rachmaninoff conductors, Nézet-Séguin navigated the final movement's false endings and conjured the kind of sonic grandeur that made the composer fall in love with the Philadelphians many decades ago.